Amnesty International researcher Oleg Kozlovsky has given details about his alleged abduction and torture at the hands of security officers in the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia, 900 miles south of Moscow.
Mr Kozlovksy travelled to the capital, Magas, on 5 October to document the ongoing protests against a controversial border deal with neighbouring Chechnya. His ordeal began with a knock on his hotel door the following evening. On the other side was a man offering an introduction to an opposition protest leader.
On Monday, following a week of silence, Mr Kozlovsky listed the terrifying chain of events that, he says, followed his agreement to follow the man.
The researcher was first taken to a car, where, he said, he was met by two other men who presented themselves as law enforcement officers. After interrogating him, the men took away his phone, video camera, took him to a field, and then stripped him of his clothes.
They took photographs and threatened to publish them on the internet. They threatened rape and threatened violence against his children. They beat him and broke his ribs.
Then, with a gun to the head, they staged a mock execution.
Mr Kozlovsky, who has been evacuated out of Russia by Amnesty, tells The Independent that he had never believed his abductors would follow through with the execution. His killing would bring "no benefit to them, only scandal," he reasons.
But he was worried that things could spiral out of control.
"I couldn't rule out that things might get crazy enough, and took their threats to my family entirely seriously."
Protests against a controversial land swap agreement, now in their second week, have awoken these impoverished, sleepy, mostly-Muslim lands at the foothills of the Caucasus.
A new agreement was supposed to have resolved a long-running border dispute between Ingushetia and neighbouring Chechnya, the only regions of Russia not to be separated by legal administrative boundaries (a consequence of the Chechen declaration of independence in 1991 and subsequent wars.)
Critics claim the agreement instead serves the expansionist ambitions of Chechnya's irascible leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, and represents a capitulation by the Ingushi leadership.
The protests against the agreement have been surprisingly well-organised, and, so far, peaceful. After initially ratifying the document, deputies in the local Ingush parliament gave in to popular pressure and cancelled their vote. According to some reports, parts of the Ingush security apparatus also moved over to the protesters.
While the protests are sensitive, there is no obvious reason why Mr Kozlovsky would be targeted so violently. Ingushetia is considered to relatively safe for journalists and activists. Local security services are very active, but there rarely impose severe restrictions – unlike Mr Kadyrov's Chechnya, which declared a ban on human rights activists last month.
That said, it is not the first time researchers and journalists have been met with extreme violence inside the republic. In 2016, men in balaclavas inflicted a terrifying arson attack on a minibus carrying journalists and human rights activists. That attack was generally thought to have been masterminded and executed by Chechen security forces.
A decade earlier, in November 2007, human rights activist Oleg Orlov was abducted along with three Russian journalists. Ekaterina Sokrianskaia, director at the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Centre was working in Ingushetia at the time of that abduction. She says this week's "almost identical" abduction brought back memories.
"They too were marched to a field, subjected to a mock execution and told never to come back."
Then, Ingush security officials were suspected, and a European Court agreed. This time, too, it seems "likely" the abduction was carried out by "local, Ingush security forces, or by their proxies." They had, says Ms Sokrianskaia, hoped to discredit the protests and reduce the number of journalists working there.
A statement by the Interior Ministry of Ingushetia said they had been unable to verify the Amnesty claims. It also said Mr Kovlovsky had failed to report the matter to the police.
Speaking to the state news agency on Monday evening, Ingush leader Yunus-Bek Yevkurov suggested the incident could be a set up to discredit his government.
"The abductors said they were security officials ... but there is not a word about how this could be a provocation from any number of sides. It has simply been decided that it is the work of the state."
Identification of the suspects is likely to be straightforward, given the prevalence of CCTV in the area. Mr Kozlovsky has filed a statement to Russia's Investigative Committee, but few expect a positive response from a body so closely associated with the country's security apparatus.
Mr Kozlovsky told The Independent that he believed his abductors probably knew little about him but had become "agitated" by his note-taking.
"They wanted to know who was getting the information, and this was their way of finding out," he says. "The frightening thing is they didn't seem to know any other way."